Abstract
Although few if any of Marx’s theories were constructed on the basis of systematic observation of “tribal” societies,1 I am impressed by how well they fit many of the facts about them. In particular, the more sophisticated a people’s technology, and, presumably, therefore also the greater the surplus available to them, the more and more differentiated their “culture”, material and otherwise, and the more likely they are to have private ownership of land and other means of production; both commodity exchange and slavery, feudalism, or other coercive forms of labour; centralized political and legal decisionmaking dominated by a small minority of the community, such as male elders and/or property owners; repressive laws and punishments for transgressing them; and centralized, institutionalized religions with full-time priests.2
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Notes
See especially Morton H. Fried, The Evolution of Political Society (New York: Random House, 1967), pp. 154–74.
In addition to the studies by Hobhouse et al., Udy, Mandel and myself and my colleagues described in my Social Psychology … (op. cit., Chapter 7), see Fried, op. cit., Gerard Lenski and Jean Lenski (Human Societies (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974)),
and Katherine S. Newman (Law and Social Organization: A comparative study of pre-industrial societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)).
Marshall Sahlins, “The original affluent society”, pp. 1–39 in Stone Age Economics (New York: Aldine, 1974).
E.g., Sahlins, “Notes on the Original Affluent Society”, pp. 85–9 in Richard Lee and Irven DeVore (eds), Man the Hunter (Chicago: Aldine, 1968).
June Helm (ed.), Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 6, The Subarctic (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1981) pp. 130, 144, 190, 201, 339.
Julian Steward, Basin-Plateau Aboriginal Sociopolitical Groups (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology) Bulletin 120, 1938, pp. 1, 9, 20, 33, 46, 64, 73, 75, 134, 142, 152, 231.
Julian Steward (ed.), Handbook of South American Indians (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology) Bulletin 143, vol. 1, 1946, pp. 48, 55, 246, 261. Vol. 3, 1948, pp. 461, 463.
Maurice Bloch, Marxism and Anthropology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) p. 91.
Although he cites no specific data, the latter can be found in, for instance, Jane Christian and Peter Gardiner’s The Individual in Northern Dene Thought and Communication (Canadian Ethnology Service Paper No. 35. Ottawa: National Museums of Canada, 1977), p. 59;
and Annette Hamilton’s “Descended from father, belonging to country: Rights to land in the Australian Western desert” (pp. 85–108 in Eleanor Leacock and Richard Lee (eds), Politics and History in Band Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)), p. 92.
Herbert Barry, I. L. Child and M. K. Bacon, “Relation of child training to subsistence economy”, American Anthropologist, vol. 61 (February 1959), pp. 51–63.
David Damas (ed).), Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 5, The Arctic (Washington: Smithsonian Institute, 1984) pp. 287, 331–41, 354, 403–4, 436.
D. P. Sinha, “The Birhors” pp. 371–403 in M. G. Bicchieri (ed.), Hunters and Gatherers Today (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972). Lee, op. cit., p. 365.
For the fact that the position of women is generally better among foragers than pastoralists and agriculturalists, see Kathleen Gough, “The origin of the family”, Journal of Marriage and the Family, vol. 33 (November 1971), pp. 760–71.
Steward, “Ethnology of the Owens Valley Paiute”, University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology, 1932–4, vol. 33, pp. 233–350, pp. 308–11; 1946, op. cit., pp. 343, 440–1, 463. Bicchieri, op. cit., p. 211.
Colin Turnbull, The Forest People (New York: Simon and Schuster (Touchstone), 1962) pp. 111–14.
V. Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself (New York; New American Library (Mentor), 1951).
The Later “Communal Modes”
For the first two stages, see Childe, 1982, op. cit., pp. 108–10; for the latter, Joseph Campbell, Oriental Mythology; The masks of God (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976) p. 101.
For example, see Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India (1556–1707) (London: Asia Publishing House, 1963) pp. 305, 329–30,
and Bipan Chandra, “Karl Marx, his theories of Asian societies, and colonial rule” (Review, vol. 1 (Summer 1981), pp. 13–91) p. 61.
P. T. Raju, “The concept of man in Indian thought”, pp. 220–319 in S. Radhakrishnan and P. T. Raju (eds), The Concept of Man: A Study in comparative philosophy (Lincoln, Nebraska: Johnson, 1966) 2nd Edition, p. 228.
Mary Boyce, A History of Zoroastrianism (Leiden/Koln: E. J. Brill, 1975).
Madelaine Biardeau, “Ahamkara: The ego principle in the Upanisad”, Contributions to Indian Sociology, No. 7 (October 1965), pp. 62–84, 82–3.
Ronald B. Inden and Ralph W. Nicolas, Kinship in Bengali Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977) p. 84.
Richard Lannoy, The Speaking Tree: A study of Indian culture and society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974).
Akos Ostor, Lina Fruzzetti and Steve Barnett (eds), Concepts of Person: Kinship, caste and marriage in India (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982) pp. 4–5.
For contemporary critiques of Marx and Marxists along these lines, see Dumont, 1965, op. cit., p. 98; 1972, op. cit.; and Steve Barnett, Lina Fruzzetti and Akos Ostor, “Hierarchy purified: Notes on Dumont and his critics”, Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 35 (August 1976), pp. 627–46.
For a contemporary Marxist dismissing caste, see especially Dipankar Gupta, “Caste, infrastructure and superstructure”, Economic and Political Weekly, 1981, vol. 16 (No. 51, December 19th), pp. 2093–2104.
M. I. Finley, The Ancient Greeks (New York: Viking, 1964) pp. 12–13.
E.g., see Finley (The Ancient Economy (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973) pp. 34–5), who argues that Socrates was exceptional in not seeing personal wealth as both necessary and good.
Slavery
Thomas Wiedemann, Greek and Roman Slavery (London: Croom Helm, 1981) p. 133.
M. I. Finley, Economy and Society in Ancient Greece (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983) p. 127.
Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The economics of American negro slavery (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974).
Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordon, Roll: The world the slaves made (New York: Random House (Vintage), 1976), pp. 388–93.
Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery: An analysis of the origins, development and structure of negro slave society in Jamaica (London/ Cranbury, N.J.: Associated Universities Presses, 1967/9) p. 182.
Herbert G. Gutman, Slavery and the Numbers Game (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975);
Paul A. David, Herbert G. Gutman, Richard Sutch, Peter Temin and Gavin Wright, Reckoning with Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).
See especially G.E.M. de Ste Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (London: Duckworth, 1981) pp. 114, 120, 133, 144.
See also the latter’s In Red and Black: Marxian explorations in Southern and Afro-American History (New York: Pantheon, 1971) pp. 125–7, and the editor’s introduction to Bracey Meier Rudwick (ed.), American Slavery: The question of resistance (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1977).
Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London: New Left Books (Verso), 1978) p.79.
U. B. Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South (Boston: Little, Brown, 1929).
Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943).
Stanley Elkins, Slavery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959).
This is the position taken by most of Elkins’ critics in Ann J. Lane (ed.), The Debate Over Slavery: Stanley Elkins and his critics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), including Roy Simon Bryce-Laporte (pp. 269–92) and George M. Fredrickson and Christopher Lasch (pp. 223–44).
Feudalism
Rodney Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press (Clarendon), 1975) pp. 125–6.
Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978).
For a useful compendium of some of this material, see Rodney Hilton’s edited volume, entitled The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London: New Left Books (Verso), 1978).
For example, see Lawrence Stone’s “The bourgeois revolution of Seventeenth-Century England revisited”, Past and Present, No. 109 (November 1985), pp. 44–54.
Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical ideas during the English Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin (Peregrine), 1984).
The Guild System
For example, see Unwin, 1963, op. cit., p. 241, and D. M. Palliser, “The trade gilds of Tudor York”, pp. 86–116 in Peter Clark and Paul Slack (eds), Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500–1700 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972) pp. 94, 106.
Fritz Rörig, The Medieval Town (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969).
E.g., see Palliser, op. cit., and Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy (New York: Knopf, 1979).
A Golden Age/Renaissance
Agnes Heller, Renaissance Man (New York: Schocken, 1981) pp. 51–2.
Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) pp. 45–7.
See also Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) pp. 2, 11–7, 30, 36, 46–53, 157, 232, 235–6.
See especially Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual, 1050–1200 (London: SPCK, 1972).
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Religion (New York: Schocken, 1964) pp. 97–109, 152–3, 189, 269–71, 299–300.
The Ascendancy of the Bourgeoisie
R. S. Neale, “Introduction” and “ ‘The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part’”. Pp. 2–27 and 84–102 in Eugene Kamenka and R. S. Neale (eds), Feudalism, Capitalism and Beyond (London: Edward Arnold, 1975).
Hill, From Reformation to Industrial Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), pp. 17, 127.
The “Making” of the Working Class
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Random House (Vintage), 1963), Chapters 8 and 9.
George Rudé, The Crowd in History (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1982), p. 180.
Craig Calhoun, The Question of Class Struggle: Social foundations of popular radicalism during the Industrial Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
Charles Tilly, Louise Tilly and Richard Tilly, The Rebellious Century, 1830–1930 (London: Dent, 1975) pp. 233–4, 279, 281.
Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English working class history, 1832–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) pp. 53, 60, 91, 106–11, 157, 168.
William H. Sewell, Work and Revolution in France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) pp. 143, 154–5, 266, 283.
Mark Traugott, Armies of the Poor: Determinants of working-class participation in the Parisian insurrection of June 1848 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) pp. 7–10, 171–4.
Vincent, op. cit. Dennis Smith, Conflict and Compromise: Class formation in English society, 1830–1914 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982) p. 137.
“Advanced” or “Late” Capitalism
For example, see George Lichtheim, Marxism (New York: Praeger, 1965) pp. 188–90,
and Geoffrey Kay, The Economic Theory of the Working Class (London: Macmillan, 1979), Chapter 4 and pp. 72–8.
Ernest Mandel (Late Capitalism (London: New Left Books (Verso), 1978) p. 178) claims that Marx was in fact not only aware that increases in productivity can allow the rate of surplus value and real wages to rise at the same time, but that this may be the rule rather than the exception; however, I am not at all convinced that this is an accurate interpretation.
On the first matter, see especially Michael Burawoy’s Manufacturing Consent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
On the second, for Britain, see Stephen Wood, Industrial Relations and Management Strategy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983);
for the U.S., Derek Jones and Jan Svejmar (eds), Participatory and Self-Managed Firms (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1982);
the U.S. and Canada, Donald V. Nightingale, Workplace Democracy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982).
See Harvie Ramsey, “Cycles of control”, Sociology, vol. 11 (September 1977), pp. 481–505 (p. 483).
For critiques of these schemes and their alleged effects, see Ramsey, op. cit.; Woods, op. cit. James Rinehart, “Appropriating workers’ knowledge: Quality control circles at a General Motors plant”, Studies in Political Economy, No. 13 (Spring 1984), pp. 75–97.
Don Wells, Soft Sell: “Quality of working life” programs and the productivity race (Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 1986).
E.g., H. Roy Kaplan, Lottery Winners (New York: Harper and Row, 1978).
His results for the case of Canada were much the same as these for the U.S. See Julianne Labreche, “Land of the small-time spenders”, MacLean’s, December 11, 1978, pp. 21–2.
Martin Meissner, Elizabeth W. Humphreys, Scott Meis, and William J. Scheu, “No exit for wives: sexual division of labour”, Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, vol. 12 (November 1975), pp. 424–39.
Martin Meissner, “Sexual division of labour and inequality: Labour and leisure”, pp. 160–79 in Marylee Stephenson (ed.), Women in Canada, 2nd edition (Toronto: New Press, 1977).
Pat and Hugh Armstrong, The Double Ghetto: Canadian women and their segregated work (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1978).
Michele Barrett, Women’s Oppression Today (London: New Left Books, 1980).
David Gordon, Richard Edwards and Michael Reich, Segmented Work, Divided Workers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
As claimed, for example, by such proponents of the “new working class” thesis as Serge Mallet (The New Working Class (Nottingham: Spokesman Books, 1975).
Essays on the New Working Class (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1975).
Here, see particularly Duncan Gallie’s In Search of the New Working Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
E.g., Robert Blauner, Alienation and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964).
For example, see H. Kern and Michael Schumann (Industriearbeit und Arbeiterbewuβtsein (Frankfurt am Main: Europaische Verlagsanstalt, 1970))
and Theo Nichols, Peter Armstrong, and Huw Beynon (Workers Divided (London: Fontana, 1976).
Living with Capitalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977)).
The classic restatement of the de-skilling hypothesis is Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974).
For some empirical critiques, see Andrew Friedman, Industry and Labour: Class struggle and monopoly capitalism (London: Macmillan, 1977);
Ken Kusterer, Know How on the Job: The important working knowledge of “unskilled workers” (Boulder: Greenwood Press, 1978);
Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain (New York: Basic Books, 1979);
Stephen Wood (ed.), The Degradation of Work?: Skill, deskilling and the labour process (London: Hutchinson, 1982).
E.g., Peter Wilmott and Michael Young, Family and Class in a London Suburb (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968).
John H. Goldthorpe, David Lockwood, Frank Bechhofer, and Jennifer Platt, The Affluent Worker in the Class Structure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).
The classification scheme is David Lockwood’s. See his “Sources of variation in working class images of society”, pp. 98–114 in Joseph A. Kahl (ed.), Comparative Perspectives in Stratification (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968).
For critiques, see K. Roberts, F. G. Cook, S. C. Clark, and Elizabeth Semeonoff, The Fragmentary Class Structure (London: Heinemann, 1977);
M. Bulmer (ed.), Working Class Images of Society (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975);
Howard H. Davis, Beyond Class Images (London: Croom Helm, 1979).
For a relatively unsuccessful attempt to apply the conception to Canada, see Vincent Keddie, “Class identification and party preference among manual workers” (Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, vol. 17 (February 1980), pp. 24–6).
For some general, non-specifically class, trend data indicating substantial increases in feelings of political powerlessness since the 1960s, see Robert S. Gilmour and Robert B. Lamb, Political Alienation in Contemporary America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975) pp. 16–21, 53–4,
and Harold D. Clarke, and Jane Jenson, Lawrence LeDuc, and Jon H. Pammett, Absent Mandate: The politics of discontent in Canada (Toronto: Gage, 1984) pp. 39–40.
For a more recent study of machoism and other indications of sexism among groups of male blue collar workers, see Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour (Westmead: Saxon House, 1977).
Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York: Knopf, 1972).
E.g., see Walter Runciman, Relative Deprivation and Social Justice (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972); Nichols, Armstrong and Beynon, op. cit.
See Note 27 in the Introduction to Part IV, and James O’Connor’s The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973).
For the former, see, e.g., Martyn Nightingale, “UK productivity dealing in the 1960s” pp. 316–33 in Theo Nichols (ed.), Capital and Labour (London: Fontana, 1980).
Representatives of Canadian woodworkers have yet to make the move, but they speak as if it is inevitable (Jennifer Hunter, Globe and Mail, September 16, 1986, p.B5).
Here see David Noble, “Present tense technology”, Part two, Democracy, vol. 3 (Summer 1983), pp. 70–82.
See Hilary Wainwright and Dave Elliott, The Lucas Plan: A new trade unionism in the making? (London: Allison and Busby, 1982).
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© 1989 W. Peter Archibald
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Archibald, W.P. (1989). Individuation and Agency Revisited. In: Marx and the Missing Link: “Human Nature”. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09184-3_11
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